Alt.CES: D-Link announces Boxee Box, now in Dali-esque form-factor

Computers & Mobile Craft & Design
Alt.CES: D-Link announces Boxee Box, now in Dali-esque form-factor
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altCES1.jpgOne of the CES hardware announcements that looks interesting to us is D-Link’s Boxee Box, a media player built around the open/closed source Boxee application (Boxee is a “fork” of the open source XBMC media center software, with some closed, proprietary code bolted on). The Boxee Box will play Adobe Flash 10.1, H.264 (MKV, MOV), MPEG-4, Xvid, Divx, and other video formats, and will feature built-in 802.11n wireless. The Box can play 1080p video from locally-stored content and stream HD video content over the net. It has one HDMI connector, two USB 2.0, Ethernet, plus composite audio, and S/PDIF output. There is no internal hard drive(!) but there is an SD card slot.

Announced today is the fact that the Boxee Box uses the NVIDIA Tegra 2 (T20) system-on-a-chip. The T20 is built around a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 CPU which can hopefully deliver some of the graphics power for which NVIDIA is known. A lot of people have installed the Boxee software on other computers and media player hardware, and have developed plug-ins for the software. It’ll be interesting to see what they’ll do with the Boxee Box, which is allegedly going to sell for under $200.

(And, BTW: You have NOT skipped a dose of your medication. The Boxee Box really does look like it’s melting into the shelf it sits on. Hey, who said that boxes have to be rectilinear? Not really sure what to make of it. It’s different, I’ll give it that…)

The Boxee Box from D-Link

12 thoughts on “Alt.CES: D-Link announces Boxee Box, now in Dali-esque form-factor

  1. Shy Guy says:

    I might be all over this assuming I can rip Boxxee off of it and shove stock XBMC on there. The whole concept of Boxxee makes me uneasy, I don’t really want people knowing what I watch and I don’t know why people are so eager to show everyone.

  2. fenwick says:

    Why on earth wouldn’t you include composite video? Does D-link honestly think that nobody uses analog formats any more?

    And another thing, it isn’t called ‘composite audio’, just analog audio.

    1. alex.s.myopenid.com says:

      It’s a cost issue. They don’t have to do anything to convert DVI to HDMI except change the plug.

  3. Anonymous says:

    I guess the box looks kind of “cool,” but shapes like this make it much harder to place these things. Unless you want to leave it sitting by itself on a shelf of table, a simple rectangular box with the “normal” orientation is much easier to work with.

    This will take up a lot more room than I’d want to give it, I think.

    1. jeff-o says:

      Perhaps they’re worried that people will set stuff on top of it, causing it to overheat. So, they designed it to automatically shed any items placed on top!

  4. Mike says:

    Meh, I don’t like it. It’ll prolly troll all the time.

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Gareth Branwyn is a freelance writer and the former Editorial Director of Maker Media. He is the author or editor of over a dozen books on technology, DIY, and geek culture. He is currently a contributor to Boing Boing, Wink Books, and Wink Fun. His free weekly-ish maker tips newsletter can be found at garstipsandtools.com.

View more articles by Gareth Branwyn

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